


Handsome as ever

by MagicalDragon



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Gender/Sexuality, Friendship, Gen, Genderqueer Doctor, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Queer Themes, Sexual Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 14:01:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18262772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalDragon/pseuds/MagicalDragon
Summary: “Has your flirting really not changed at all over the years?”Jack shrugged, a smug look on his face.“If it works, it works.”The Doctor turned towards Ryan with a genuinely puzzled expression on her face.“Is it working?” she asked.Ryan could do nothing but repeat himself with another long: “Eerrrr…..”The Doctor and Team Tardis run into Jack. Important conversations are had.





	Handsome as ever

The Doctor had been showing Ryan the interactive fountains that were placed around the central plaza of Klækotsk, second biggest city of the planet Arilvor, as they waited for Yaz and Graham to return from the street food market nearby, when they ran into him.

“Jack!” The Doctor shouted across the crowd.

“That’s Jack!” She told Ryan, pointing excitedly in front of her, as if he’d know who she was talking about.

A white humanoid, who, to be fair to The Doctor, did stand out among the mostly amphibian crowd, turned around and walked towards them.

“Hi there,” Jack said with a charming smile. “Forgive me, but I seem to have forgotten your name?”

“It’s me, Jack!” The Doctor declared with a massive smile.

This Jack looked puzzled for a moment, but then his face lit up.

“Doctor?” He asked. “Doctor, is that you?”

“Of course it is,” she told him and went in for a hug that Jack gladly returned.

“What a change, ay, Doctor?” Jack said when they parted, looking her up and down. “Handsome as ever, of course. I love the earring.”

“Oh stop it, you,” The Doctor said.

This is where Ryan stepped in with a long: “Eerrrr…?”

“Oh, of course!” The Doctor said. “Ryan, this is Jack. He used to travel with me back in the day.”

“Back in the day, now, is it, Doctor?” Jack asked in an aside before he turned his full attention on Ryan.

“Captain Jack Harkness,” he said and offered Ryan his hand and a winning smile. “And who are you?”

“Ryan Sinclair,” Ryan said, feeling somewhat flattered but mostly overwhelmed by the attentive way Jack was looking at him.

“Has your flirting really not changed at all over the years?”

Jack shrugged, a smug look on his face.

“If it works, it works.”

The Doctor turned towards Ryan with a genuinely puzzled expression on her face.

“Is it working?” she asked.

Ryan could do nothing but repeat himself with another long: “Eerrrr…..”

 

 

Ryan was saved from trying to decipher the small talk Jack and The Doctor was engaging in, when Yaz and Graham returned with quite a few bags of alien street food.

“We got a lot of different things, we didn’t know what you two wanted,” Graham said. “Who’s your friend?"

“Captain Jack Harkness,” Jack started again as he offered Graham his hand. “And who are you?”

“Graham. Graham O’Brien,” Graham said, so dumbfounded that he shook Jack’s hand for far too long.

“Delighted to meet you, Graham O’Brien,” Jack said, smiling broadly as they finally stopped shaking hands.

“Barking up the wrong tree there, Jack,” The Doctor quipped

“How would you know?” Jack quipped back with a sidelong glance at her. “Wouldn’t be the first time I was a first time.”

The Doctor just scoffed in fond annoyance, while Graham looked decidedly bewildered as Jack winked at him, before turning his winning smile on Yaz.

“And you are?”

“Yasmin Khan,” Yaz said, with an aborted look towards The Doctor, who had started to walk back towards the TARDIS. “Yaz to my friends.”

“Lovely to meet you, Yaz,” Jack said and stuck out his hand for her, but before he and Yaz could shake hands, The Doctor was yelling for him from the TARDIS door.

“Jack, I want your help with the relativity differentiator - if you’re quite done flirting, that is!”

Jack grinned as he turned towards The Doctor and almost skipped towards her.

“Don’t know, I didn’t get to compliment the TARDIS yet, did I?”

The Doctor just groaned in answer as Jack laughed.

 

 

Yaz, Ryan and Graham were feasting on all the alien street food they’d bought just outside the plaza, while sounds of banter between Jack and The Doctor made its way out through the open TARDIS door.

“Who do you think he is?” Yaz asked.

“The Doctor said he used to travel with her.”

Yaz took a tentative bite out of a suspicious looking roll, before discarding it with a grimace.

“He used to be us?”

Ryan shrugged.

“I guess so.”

“He seems to know more than we do, though,” Graham said. “I mean, can you imagine The Doctor asking one of us for help with the TARDIS?”

“Maybe he travelled with her for longer, picked up a few more thing,” Ryan suggested.

Yaz mumbled a “maybe”, but seemed unconvinced.

A few seconds after, Jack burst out of the TARDIS door, threw himself on the ground next to them, and joined their feast as had they known each other for years.

“Ooo, is that a Pelokkian wrap?” He asked, before reaching into the middle of their pile and grabbing what looked to be big, pink leaves wrapped around some sort of meat.

“The Doctor not joining us?” Yaz asked.

“Nah, he threw me out when he didn’t like my suggestions,” Jack said with a laugh. “I’m sure he’ll be out soon, though. He really likes Pelokkian wraps.”

Though Jack didn’t seem to noticed it, an awkward silence dominated the group for a few long moments.

“Why are you calling her “he”?” Yaz demanded. “I don’t care what she looked like before, that doesn’t give you the right to do that.”

Jack looked up at her and blinked slowly a few times.

“Oh, my bad!” He said. “I didn’t realise she’d changed pronouns.”

Another short silence followed that, but of course that was when The Doctor made her reappearance

“What?” She asked as she sat down, reaching out for a Pelokkian wrap like Jack had predicted.

“I didn’t know you’d changed pronouns, Doctor.”

“Oh, that,” The Doctor said dismissively as she took a bite out of the wrap. “Well, humans started doing it this regeneration and I don’t really care so I thought: why not? Good with a bit of change sometimes, isn’t it?”

“21st Century humans, you mean,” Jack said. “People make fewer assumptions when I’m from.”

“When you’re from?” Yaz repeated.

“I’m from the 52nd Century, originally,” Jack explained. “Been a long time since I was there, though…”

“How come?”

He sighed deeply.

“Got stuck near the end of the 19th century, no way to time travel, had to live it real time. Which, let me tell you, is one nasty shock when you’re like me.”

“What? Bisexual?” Yaz asked.

Jack smiled drily as he popped a roll like the one Yaz had discarded earlier in his mouth.

“See, that’s the thing:” he said after eating it, “sexuality doesn’t really matter so much in my time, so I never had need of any labels before time travelling. Well, omnisexual does get thrown around a bit, but it’s more like a personality trait, you know? Suppose you’d call it “promiscuous”, but “omnisexual” doesn’t have a negative connotation. Always thought the idea of sexuality as identity a bit quaint till I had to live through the entire 20th Century.”

“You what?” Ryan asked flabbergasted, only now fully comprehending the meaning of his earlier comment about being stuck in time. “How old are you?”

“Not as old as The Doctor, older than Graham” Jack said.

“So that wasn’t…” Graham starts. “So you weren’t winding me up, then?”

“Oh, I would never,” Jack said and winked.

Graham didn’t know what to say to that, it seemed, but he was saved from coming up with a response, as the TARDIS chose that moment to make a loud noise.

 

 

The loud noise turned out to be a distress call. Or rather, it turned out to be a scam, disguised as a distress call. Which turned out to still lead them to distressed people. That seemed to be how it went when The Doctor was involved.

The scam was designed to trap people so the scammers could imprison them and sell them on.

Human trafficking. In space.

Great.

Jack had seen it before, of course, and it didn't surprised him, just disgust him. As much as it did disgust him, however, it was all overshadowed by how exhilarating it was to be running around with The Doctor again. Even if it was a new Doctor, a Doctor he didn’t know as he’d known his own or even the one after him, she was still The Doctor and nothing in the world felt quite like being with The Doctor did.

The Doctor had gotten them out of the trap rather easily, but that was only the beginning. Now they were on a mission to rescue those already imprisoned - and stop the slavers from getting to anyone else. Right now they were pretending to still be stuck, trying not to alert the slavers to the threat they posed, while they waited for the virus they’d released into the ship’s system to do its job and open all the containment cells.

It was quiet in their cell. The Doctor had told them all to get some sleep while the computers battled it out. She wouldn’t sleep, of course. Time lord rarely did, from what Jack understood. Or maybe it was just her. Back when he and Rose had travelled with his Doctor, they would always leave him in the control room when they went to sleel and wake up to find him still there. 

The Doctor wasn’t the only one who wasn’t sleeping though; Jack couldn’t seem to find rest and had given up. Now they sat together silently listening to the sound of the ship’s mechanisms, until The Doctor spoke:

“I’m so sorry about Ianto, Jack."

“I… thank you,” Jack said. Even to his own ears, he sounded defeated.

“If I could have…” The Doctor began but Jack stopped her.

“I know,” he interrupted. “It’s alright.”

They were quiet for a few long moments, nothing but sounds of the ship to listen to, till The Doctor’s voice mingled together with them again:

“He seemed a remarkable man; clever, kind.”

“He was,” Jack said, sinking something. “He… he made me a better man, in the end. I… he didn’t want to be in a relationship with a man for the longest time, you know? He always commented when people assumed we were together, he didn’t want them to think we were... And I… well I probably took that to mean he didn’t want a deeper relationship and I didn’t always treat him right. I should have… I should have talked to him about it. Told him I loved him. I mean I did, I did tell him, but not… not really. I don’t know if he knew. I don’t know if he thought he was just some attractive friend I liked sleeping with…”

“He knew,” The Doctor said.

“You can’t know that.”

“You’re not good at hiding that sort of thing, Jack,” The Doctor said, her tone oddly soft, as if she was apologising for even saying it.

Jack laughed humorlessly.

“Yeah, well, you know me, Doctor. I bounce back. I’m sure I’ll pick up a new _dance partner_ soon enough,” Jack said, his tone a poor imitation of the cheerful, flirty one from earlier.

“It’s not all about _dancing_ ,” The Doctor told him, still serious. “But you already know that.”

Jack sank something again. This really was The Doctor. It seemed a silly thought, because he knew it quite well, but the ease with which she had answered his reference in kind had him feeling the truth rather than just knowing it. Feelings he thought he had left behind long ago welled up in him. Feelings about The Doctor, and for The Doctor, and about Rose and for Ianto, and about being alone all these years… they all mixed together and overwhelmed him.

Before he could decide not to, Jack turned towards The Doctor and enveloped her in a hug.

“You know, I really like this version of you, Doctor,” he said, quietly, trying to hold his emotions back.

“I’m sorry for the things I said back then, Jack. I shouldn’t have said what I said.”

Jack laughed humorlessly.

“You weren’t wrong.”

The Doctor withdrew from Jack enough to find his eyes.

“Yes, I was, Jack. You listen to me, Jack Harkness: I was wrong. Whatever else you are, you are a brave, heroic man, and what happened to you ultimately came down to me. Rose… she couldn’t know what… It wasn’t her fault. And it wasn’t yours. Leaving you behind was cruel and what I said to you in Utopia… that was even crueler.”

Jack didn’t know when he’d started crying; he only noticed it when The Doctor stopped talking.

“I couldn’t be what you wanted me to be, Jack,” she continued a bit after, softer. “And this is going to sound presumptuous, after all this time, but if there’s still something there, I still can’t. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have been a better friend to you.”

Jack attempted to wipe his eyes, but the tears wouldn’t stop coming.

“I know… I knew you didn’t feel what I felt. And I didn’t need you to. But it did make what you had to say harder to hear.”

“I was too wrapped up in myself,” The Doctor said. “I wronged Martha and I wronged you, I was just so…”

“You were grieving,” Jack said, feeling an irrational need to defend a version of The Doctor that had haunted his darkest thoughts for decades. “It does things to you.”

“Still, I shouldn't have let it affect me so,” she said. “You'd think I was used to it by now.”

“I've only lived a fraction of the time you have, Doctor,” Jack said. “And I would be very shocked if that's ever something you grow used to.”

The Doctor looked at him. Really looked at him. Then she hugged him again.

“Right you are, Jack Harkness,” she said. “Right you are.”

 

 

They saved the day in the end, because of course they did. She was The Doctor, after all. The easy friendship between The Doctor and Jack that had been so obvious throughout the whole ordeal had Ryan wondering if Jack might end up joining them, but it seemed he had other plans. While his goodbye to The Doctor was a quiet, but intense affair that Ryan, Yaz and Graham only saw from afar, his goodbye to them was a confident smile, a flippant “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do” and a flirty wink.

This should have been the end of it.

But Ryan had not been sleeping quite so deeply that night as The Doctor and Jack had assumed and he had heard some of their conversation. Enough to be curious, enough to keep agonising over how to bring it up with The Doctor. Eventually, after Graham and Yaz had both retired to their rooms in the TARDIS, he was forced to.

“Out with it,” The Doctor said.

“What?”

“Whatever it is you’ve been dying to ask all day,” she said.

Ryan hesitated again, but then asked:

“Who was Ianto?”

A pained expression came over The Doctor’s face.

“Jack’s boyfriend,” she said. “He… well, he died.”

Ryan nodded. He’d gathered as much.

“Was he travelling with you as well?”

“No, no,” The Doctor said. “No, this was after. Jack had his own thing, his own team, it was good for him - well, not that I approved of what they were doing, necessarily, Jack has always been too trigger-happy, but…”

Here The Doctor stopped, seemingly realising that she was going on a tangent.

“Well, Ianto died right when I thought Jack was going to be alright…”

Ryan nodded. He wanted to show more sympathy, but had no idea how.

“When was this?” Ryan asked. “I mean, what time was Ianto from?”

The Doctor seemed surprised by this line of questioning, but didn’t comment.

“Oh, around your time, I think. Definitely 21st century.”

Ryan nodded. So... now, or 80 years from now. He knew that in the grand scheme of things - that for The Doctor - the distinction didn’t matter. But in this, for him… it did matter.

The Doctor was frowning.

“Wait, it was definitely earlier than you lot…” she said. “I think, it was, at least… well, it must have been, the whole - well, the whole… does “The 456” mean anything to you?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “They took control of my body when I was 10.”

“Oh, you were a kid at that time?” The Doctor said. “Yeah, yeah that makes sense then. Well, it was… Jack and Ianto and their team were mixed up in that whole thing.”

Ryan nodded. He had gotten the answers he wanted, but between the indirect way he’d gotten them and the fact that they were mixed up with barely remembered memories of an alien controlling his words, he had no idea how to feel about it.

“What’s this really about, Ryan?” The Doctor said, seemingly sensing his uncertainty.

“I…” Ryan tried. “Well, I guess this doesn’t mean much to you, but I might be like Jack, and I…”

Try as he might, Ryan didn’t know how to continue. The Doctor did.

“Of course...” she said with a melancholy smile. “I make my jokes about humans, but the truth is, every species have their ways of arbitrarily judging others. But every species has the potential to overcome that, as well, and every species has members that are far too kind to indulge in such nonsense.”

“Thanks,” Ryan said; her words meant more than that conveyed, but he didn’t know how to answer them in kind.

The Doctor smiled that wistful smile again, a smile that made Ryan want to ask a thousand questions about her own past, about how she knew these things with such intimacy… but Ryan felt he had asked enough.

“Thank you,” he said again.”I… I think I’ll be heading to bed now.”

The Doctor merely nodded.


End file.
